What is UX or User Experience?

UX or User Experience design is an element of enhancing the user’s satisfaction with products or services by improving usability, accessibility, and pleasure during customer interaction. UX involves designing and planning experience and creating a workflow for the users of a website or any piece of technology.

The interaction between your visitor and your website is as vital as the design as well as the content on your web pages. Furthermore, UX Design is part of the design process more focused on the general experience than the appearance of the site.

Even though we are discussing it in the context of web design, it is also an essential part of any product success.

To put it clear, UX refers to the what, when, why, where, how and who uses a product. It is the skeleton of your site, and it’s the reason why you can’t just make a website without planning or better look for user experience design companies. Moreover, you need to do research (a lot of it) and planning to figure out where things should go, what you need design, and what it should say.

Why is UX important for your website?

It helps you figure out your goals.

A big part of UX is discovery. This discovery involves interviewing main stakeholders to learn about the project at hand. In questioning the heads of marketing, sales, creative staff, and CEOs, you will learn as much as you can about every aspect of the business.

The most significant part of this is getting these different perspectives. It is also the job of a UX designer or UX design company to take notes of these various feedbacks and plan accordingly. Often, these different areas have different goals and can cause contrast and overlapping. But these goals directly play into the site’s structure, content, and audience.

It helps you figure out who your audiences are.

Once you figure out your goals, you can focus now on your target audience. The best way to do this is to know your customers base and create personas. These personas are fictional embodiments of the real people that use your website. A website can have multiple personas, and each persona can (and should) have different backgrounds, personalities, needs, and end goals.

This method is helpful because it allows you to section your audience. It will help you figure out what you need to do to provide the best experience that will enable visitors to meet their goals. Because of that, the site will attract people, and eventually convert into a sale or lead. The real success of the site comes when you figure out how to make both users and stakeholders happy.

It helps you with an organization and content creation.

Knowing your goals and your audience will allow you to figure out what exactly people are looking for when they visit your site. This information will influence both your sitemap and page structure.

When you know what people want, you can create appealing and on-topic content. Furthermore, you can’t just post a decent looking blog up and call it a day. The real reason why people go to websites (well most business websites anyway) is that they are looking for some information.

If your audience doesn’t get something helpful out of your site, they will find it elsewhere that’s why content is valuable. Your website content must involve primarily two things: voice and tone.

Are you fun and playful, intelligent and informative, wordy or straight to the point? This statement directly relates to branding, and how people see your company. Content also involves WHAT you say. It may look easy, but it is somewhat a form of art.

Today, people have shorter and shorter attention spans and more and more options. That said, you need to charm people quickly and give them the information they need without hesitation.

It helps you save money.

Making smart choices based on research will give your website a longer shelf life that if you just put something together. Well, all of this planning isn’t for nothing. And if you choose to do an iterative design, you can always learn from your site’s performance and make continuous improvements rather than focusing on one expensive redesign after another.

It helps you make money.

Regarding research as well as planning, you can create a website that works for you and your visitors. If you already know your customers, create engaging content, and provide an excellent service—everything should fall into place. When this happens, you will get a significant return on all of the time and effort that went into building your site.

Why you should consider User Experience (UX)

The Case

You want your visitors to have a good experience. The good news is that when you pay attention to UX, you can fix all of that and more. In general, people quickly forget about websites that don’t appeal to them.

You can have the best-looking website on the Internet, but if people can’t use it, it’s useless. Your site needs to appeal to its target audience and focusing on UX ensures that it does. That’s why Facebook, Google, Bing, Amazon and other successful companies focus heavily on UX.

User Experience is key for complex sites that make users unable to navigate the website easily and how to use it. Yes, an eye-catching website is crucial, but the user experience is even more so. Your site should be easy to navigate, simple to understand and give your visitors a reason to return.

Neglecting these components can result in a sloppy site that people will not come back to. So, when you develop an interaction-rich experience, it will drive users back to a website and become potential customers.

The Payoff

UX makes the complex easy to use.

By implementing UX strategies, you can effectively improve how your company engages with customers and how they interact with your website. This method applies both to internal and external operations with companies seeing lower cost of customer acquisition, increased sales, increased customer retention, more market share and less training costs.

When users navigate your website, it just takes them a few seconds to determine whether your site is worth their time or not. What you can do is arm yourself with the tools—hire a professional digital marketing agency—to make informed decisions about UX in the design process.